Feature Article : "The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Modernghana.com."

[The Part 1 of this piece centred on three aspects: One, the importance of Shakespeare's work in bridging the gap between the ancient and modern, and cutting across cultures; Two, the heroic adventures of Julius Caesar, and his murder in the Roman senate; and Three, Mark Antony refuting Brutus's claim that Caesar sought a kingly crown through excessive ambition.

Read my earlier article about tips for WASSCE students offering African Poetry on www.ghanaschoolsonline. com : Click on Anis Haffar Writes. From the website, email article or print copies to share with teachers and mates. Focus on group successes.

Good Luck! Continue to prepare for an “A” in the exams. Note: all italicized items in this article are direct quotes from the play.]

The play, Julius Caesar, set the dramatic tone in the assassination of “a tyrant”, “a man too full of himself”. It also exposed the fickle and gullible mob, as Cassius allowed that Caesar “would not be a wolf / But that he sees the Romans are but sheep”.

In the famous Forum scene, after the murder, the mob (played by the plebeians) scream: “They were traitors: honourable men!” The mob sways irrationally between Brutus, Cassius, and Antony: It didn't seem to matter anymore to the masses who it was that led Rome: “Let him be Caesar”.

Just as quickly the mob ignored their own curiosity and greed to know about Caesar's will; and later turned on Cinna the poet, mistaking him for Cinna the conspirator: “Tear him for his bad verses …It is no matter, his name's Cinna… Tear him … burn all”: Brutus, Cassius, Decius, Casca, Ligarius.

Conspicuously missing from the list was Cinna the conspirator. Having mangled the wrong Cinna to death, the search party forgets the real culprit.

We'd just witnessed a spectacle common in some communities, the primitive battle between the hunter and the prey, that is, mob-lynching. It's “hail [the] honourable” one moment, and “tear [the] villain” the next. The scene - orations, riot, war - is prescient, and has modern flavours.

Anyone with a feel for “the crowd” can relate to the mob mentality; and, alas, the sly rhetoric and cunning devices used to sway the public in divisive politics and/or dictatorships.

In crafting dialogue, Shakespeare's scripts showed that all men are fallible, and it was a mistake to trust anybody too much. He fit the scales where each character was individualized and in symmetry.

Consider Mark Antony, for example: He was righteously peeved at the murder of his close friend Caesar, and prepared to avenge his death. But lurking behind that uprightness was the egoistic design to use Caesar's dead body and the funeral to further his tastes for the “revels long a-nights” – wine, women, and sport.

With his cunning oratory in the Forum, “Here was a Caesar: when comes another?” he swayed the mob against Brutus. But, in the end, gazing at Brutus's dead body, he admitted “This was the noblest Roman of all …/ His life was gentle … / This was a man.” Mark Antony's loyalty was to corpses; he loved the dead for the convenience of having them out of the way.

Brutus offered another example of Shakespeare's ability to compartmentalize characters. Brutus was “in a general honest thought / And common good to all.” But did “regicide” or “tyrannicide” morally justify his idealistic cravings to save the Roman Republic? Without committing, the playwright threw that debate squarely into the audience's lap. The conflicts between “the means” and “the ends” offered riddles that dogged Socrates and any gang of thinkers to this day.

Brutus is the pivot that skews the play from the start to finish. Though the key issues are spread among the main characters, Brutus embodied the chief elements epitomizing him as a treacherous murderer. How could one love and murder at the same time without the least envy?

How could he allow himself to be deceived to murder the man he loved through Cassius's flattery: “Brutus and Caesar … / Why should that name be sounded more than yours? / yours, is as fair a name:”

Who would need Brutus for a friend? Through his noble idealism, he “stumble[d] down the ladder of love to the bottom rung”, to sponge a line from Nat King Cole's jazzy blues “Welcome to the club”.

Brutus was not killed fighting in the civil war that ensued. He climbed a rock (and assisted by a friend, Strato) drove a sword right through his chest. His last words: “Caesar, now be still, / I kill'd not thee with half so good a will.”

Earlier, Cassius too (assisted by Pindarus) had stabbed himself with the very same dagger he thrust into Caesar, confessing, “with this good sword / That ran through Caesar's bowels, search this bosom … / Caesar, thou art reveng'd.”

Julius Caesar himself appeared only thrice, and briefly, in the play named after him. One, in Act I, 2: confronting the soothsayer's “Beware the Ides of March”; two, in Act II, 3: where “Calpurnia, in her sleep cried out, / Help, ho: They murther Caesar”; and, in Act lll, l: with his last words, “Et tu Brute”, when he was murdered.

Through a measured mix of history and inventive drama, Shakespeare offered mirrors for everyone's self-examination, before judging the other: “For the eye sees not itself.”  Continued    Source: Anis Haffar

"The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Modernghana.com." To have your articles publish, please submit them to editor@modernghana.com.

Other Articles by Anis Haffar